Insomniac Sentinel

Poems

by Abraham Smith

Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and cotemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Smith’s recent publications include Insomniac Sentinel (Baobab Press, 2023), Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2022), and Bear Lite Inn (New Michigan Press, 2020). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin’ Yarns; their records It Never Ends (2023) and Break Your Heart (2020) were released on Mississippi’s Dial Back Sound. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State.

PRAISE FOR INSOMNIAC SENTINEL

“This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a less than magnetic hamlet.”

“I can hear Abraham Smith’s voice intoning in his breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a backbeat for music that these poems conjure up.”

“Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read his work and thrill to hear him read it in person.”

“you know, i am the giver/back of sound.” This bardic claim could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history’s storm. His song pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript, indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and shed light. That’s the sad note in this “gravy-to-cradle” threnody, this “lunged-up thud tender.” Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions, like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly on its wing, or on its song?”

excerpt from

“IN KEY OF WISH RABBIT SINGS”

to vermillion hats marooned
upon sentimental nails
scabbed some with seafoam

slouching loom
woofing cinnamon
churn that haunch crank and

fresher outsetless owlet swings
low loaf old toe mouth
cartoon cat bread neck

like this it’s guillotine’s
brethren light loot out
one wind mechanical

why joist bird o save me
suture stretch pants pleat
egress bucket galleon

trueler taller there are none
ladder ladder loves the dust
til it don’t then up

now stooping
is it
kingly

else or i am goner
one gaghand down
wide-eyed wisdom

first joist bird alloy
sky salve slather
yr long and yr lovely

fernal gill throat furniture
undulant verve dent
frogstack neck trill

turtle winter pond
muck stack talk guinness
pinted ostrich throat cartoon

cept it’s frog frog frog frog
fair will dark tree hotel
free crane neck spindle

let’s up gas the couch that
let’s going and yesterday
to some florida of moon now

where the living and dead play
whittled punctate
legbone golfclub whistles

talk mad cloudages
veined in heart attack light
rhythm of shit country tequila dreams

pup up on shine stone
suture bird ladder down
red the head red the eyes

by way of the blood dream
by terrible shake this infant stillness
son it’s hotter than hiway milk mama

where if only we are good now
we’ll one day leashless be
maddeners of sea

waves salt cake waves
rabbit upon rabbits
a chaos of leap feet

and footnoted hearts
drum solo freak freaks
gravid dust unsettling

why soon enough sleeps
yes soon enough sleeps
mmm soon enough sleeps

calls to question
why don’t frame shudder
hangover clotheshanger that

light frozen conductored
into something like crane
dippin insides lures

insidious car lock coax
atom bomb erect out from
the eyeholes of a dead man

Book Details

Title: Insomniac Sentinel: Poems

Author: Abraham Smith

Publication Date: February 7, 2023

Trade Paperback

6 x 9

138 pages

ISBN: 978-1-936097-44-9

$16.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on indiebound.org, bookshop.org, or from Baobab Press affiliate Sundance Books and Music .

Abraham in the news:

  • Insomniac Sentinel reviewed by Nicholas Ravnikar at the NewPages Blog (Nov. 3, 2022)
  • It Never Ends, the new album from The Snarlin’ Yarns (Abraham Smith, poetry and improv), debuted in Jan. 2023